


Ruth

by ama



Series: The Home Front [1]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Banter, Canon Jewish Character, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Post-Canon, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 09:25:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2264460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/ama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joe goes back to San Francisco and is reunited with his childhood friend Ruth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ruth

**Author's Note:**

> Touches briefly on the reaction of American Jews to the Nazi genocide.

If he was being perfectly honest, Ruth wasn’t _pretty_. She had never been pretty. She was too squat to be called graceful, she had a weak chin, and her favorite colors were baby blue, yellow, and olive green, all of which looked horrible on her.

But goddamn, she had a hell of a smile.

Joe hadn’t realized this when he was home, not in any kind of real way. Hell, he and Ruth had been friends since they were kids, running through the streets of San Francisco with scraped knees and no supervision. He had poked her with a pencil in first grade, and in revenge she had pushed him down on the blacktop. Hardly love at first sight. They had always been close, though, because they _got_ each other. Ruth didn’t bullshit anybody, ever, and he had always liked that.

After he got his jump wings, when he had been home on furlough—yeah, maybe he had seen _something_ in her face. Admiration. He had cut a nice figure in his dress uniform, after all, and a lot of girls had looked at him like that. She was looking at him like that now, he realized. Shyly, almost. Like he wasn’t Joe Liebgott, the scrawny kid from the house two doors over, but someone who had _been_ somewhere, done something. And yeah, he had done a lot, but Joe wasn’t entirely sure that he deserved admiration for them.

“So… are you gonna tell me anything, or what?” she prompted

“What’s there to tell, Ruthie?” he asked with a grin, and she reached out and smacked his arm.

“I don’t know, _things_. Stories. Now that you’re a war hero and all.”

Her words made him pause. Joe stared at her for a long time, and a line of worry appeared between Ruth’s eyes. She looked down at the coffee cup in her hands and bit her lip. Joe didn’t know what to say.

All anyone had been asking him since he got home was how many Nazis he had killed. Some people—mostly the guys at the cab company, at the bar, people he ran into on the street—asked him with a laugh and a grin, and he wanted to punch their teeth in. Others—friends of his ma, mostly, and neighbors, and kids he had gone to Hebrew school with—asked him seriously, with pain in their faces and righteous anger in their low voices, and that terrified him more than anything he had seen in Europe. Anything. He would rather go back to living in Bastogne, with the whistling of bombs over his head, than have to sit here in a café in his own hometown and have another Jewish girl look at him like he was her destroying angel.

But Ruth was one of his oldest friends, and he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable around him, either. So he reached out and put his hand on top of hers.

“I don’t want to talk about it, alright?” he said. His voice came out rougher than he had intended and Ruth looked up, her eyes soft with concern. She had pretty eyes, he realized. Dark blue.

“Alright,” she said. She squeezed his hand for a moment, and then took a sip from her coffee. “David and Hannah got married while you were gone. David got sent home with a Purple Heart—his arm was still in a sling for the wedding and Hannah hated it, but he said he wasn’t about to wait around anymore, so either she married him right then or he went and found another bride.”

Joe snorted.

“That sounds like him.”

“He’s an idiot,” Ruth agreed. Their eyes met over the rim of her coffee cup and they both snorted, caught up for a second in the gleeful joy of gossiping about their neighbors. It was a bad habit they shared, no matter how many times his mother had caught them at it and clucked about evil tongues. Ruth had a wicked sense of humor and he had always loved that.

As she began a chatty monologue of gossip, Joe allowed himself to relax and he wondered, idly, when he had realized that his love for a friend had turned into more.

On the way to Bavaria, he decided. When he had been talking to Webster and dreaming of what life would be like back home.  He’d been blathering on, spilling his guts without even thinking about it because it was a sunny day and he didn’t really _need_ to think about it, and dreaming of his perfect girl. And once those words left his lips, _a smile to die for_ , he had just… thought of her. The smile she gave him the day he left, when he had tipped his cap and winked at her. He had thought of her, and felt a grin on his own face, and then he couldn’t _stop_ thinking of her and it had all hit him like a ton of bricks. He hadn’t known, then, if she felt the same. He still didn’t know—but sitting here, he found that he didn’t much care. If he had jumped out of a frigging airplane without knowing if he’d make it to the ground, he could kiss a girl without knowing if they’d get married or some shit.

She was his friend and he loved her. It was, compared to everything else in his life, simple.

“I got a Bronze Star,” he said, interrupting Ruth in the middle of her monologue. She looked up, startled, and grinned.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. In Normandy. My company had to take out some German artillery firing on Utah; me and this guy Petty operated the machine guns. It was a hell of a firefight.”

“Well, congratulations, private Liebgott,” she said sweetly.

“Corporal,” he corrected with a bit of a smirk, and Ruth snorted, shaking her head.

“It’s good to have you back, Joe,” she said in a soft voice. “Everybody worried about you, you know. Your mom spent a lot of time in our kitchen drinking too much sherry.”

“Did you worry about me?” Joe asked with a challenge in his words, but Ruth didn’t really answer. She lifted one shoulder in a shrug and tilted her head, but her eyes were fixed on the cup in her hands. They were rougher than they’d been when he went away; she had worked in a factory during the war. Doing her part. And he bet she hadn’t complained for one minute of it, because she was just that kind of girl—down to earth. God, he loved her.

“Maybe I did. You know, with that long face of yours making such a good target.”

He laughed, and teased her back, and for a few minutes they squabbled like kids. Silence fell too soon, and Joe looked down at Ruth’s cup of coffee. She had hardly touched it; really she had never liked the stuff, but he had gotten a taste for it in Europe. Shitty army ration coffee had been the only thing keeping him awake half the time, and if he could learn to like it that much, then a good strong civilian brew must be even better, right? Plus, he had liked the way “Hey Ruth, you want to go grab a coffee?” had sounded.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said now, standing. “You don’t even like this shit, do you?”

Ruth stood, clucking her tongue.

“Better ditch the army vocab or your momma’s going to kick you out,” she warned. Joe shrugged breezily and held the door open for her as they left the café into the bright San Francisco sunshine.

“Who cares? It’s about time I got my own place, doncha think? Buy a house, get married, have a couple of kids. I got plans.”

He was surprised Ruthie didn’t sprain her neck, she looked around at him so fast.

“Get married?” she echoed, shocked. “To _who_?”

“Still deciding,” he grinned, thoroughly enjoying himself. Ruth scoffed and tossed her hair.

“Good luck finding a gal who’ll put up with your sulking. And that annoying little smirk you get sometimes. And that laugh you’ve got that sounds like a donkey. And—”

“I already have,” Joe interrupted, his voice serious now, and he stopped in the middle of the street and looked at her. Ruth looked at him for a minute, confused, and then her eyes widened and then he kissed her.

It was a _good_ kiss, a real kiss—no, better than a real kiss, it was a movie kiss. His arms were wrapped tight around her and her body pressed flush against his, but she was so short that he had to bend over a bit and she had to tilt her head back like all those movie star broads. He could feel the pounding of her heart, the quickness of breath against his nose, and after a minute she reached up and ran her hands through his hair. Damn, that felt good. For a long time there was no movement except the diffident slide of her lips against his and the stroke of her fingers through his hair.

Then some jackass on the street bumped into Joe and he stumbled into Ruth; she yelped and nearly fell over and then laughed when he caught her, and her breasts bounced appealingly against his chest.

“Outta the way, buddy,” the jackass grunted.

“I’m a fucking war hero,” Joe shouted after him, and Ruth giggled in sheer delight at the ridiculousness of it all. She hid her face in his shoulder and he looked down at her wild curls fondly. Just because he could, he leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of her head, and he felt her give a happy sigh.

“You’re goddamn right you are,” she muttered.

“Hey, hey, watch the mouth. Am I supposed to take a girl with language like that home to ma?”

Ruth rolled her eyes and pulled him down for another kiss, and he smiled against her lips.


End file.
